Blockchain for decentralization of internet: prospects, trends, and challenges

Abstract

Blockchain has made an impact on today’s technology by revolutionizing the financial industry through utilization of cryptocurrencies using decentralized control. This has been followed by extending Blockchain to span several other industries and applications for its capabilities in verification. With the current trend of pursuing the decentralized Internet, many methods have been proposed to achieve decentralization considering different aspects of the current Internet model ranging from infrastructure and protocols to services and applications. This paper investigates Blockchain’s capacities to provide a robust and secure decentralized model for Internet. The paper conducts a critical review on recent Blockchain-based methods capable for the decentralization of the future Internet. We identify and investigate two research aspects of Blockchain that provides high impact in realizing the decentralized Internet with respect to current Internet and Blockchain challenges while keeping various design in considerations. The first aspect is the consensus algorithms that are vital components for decentralization of the Blockchain. We identify three key consensus algorithms including PoP, Paxos, and PoAH that are more adequate for reaching consensus for such tremendous scale Blockchain-enabled architecture for Internet. The second aspect that we investigated is the compliance of Blockchain with various emerging Internet technologies and the impact of Blockchain on those technologies. Such emerging Internet technologies in combinations with Blockchain would help to overcome Blockchain’s established flaws in a way to be more optimized, efficient and applicable for Internet decentralization.